When the first SlutWalk was held in Toronto on April 3, 2011, 3,000 women marched in response to a Toronto police officer’s comments that women could avoid assault by not dressing like “sluts.” Women were encouraged to wear whatever they wanted during the march.
Since then, SlutWalks have been held in cities throughout the world.
On Oct. 15, 2011, Winnipeg will hold its first SlutWalk march. Nila Cottrell began organizing Winnipeg’s SlutWalk in August.
“I decided to look into Winnipeg to see if we had one and I couldn’t believe that we didn’t,” she said.
Cottrell said that she is hoping for 500 or more people to attend.
Lauryn Pizey-Allen, a member of the University of Manitoba’s Womyn’s Centre, said she supports SlutWalk as a means to combat victim blaming in sexual assault cases. “We need to focus on the perpetrators of rape, rather than survivors.”
However, Pizey-Allen said she felt the second goal of SlutWalks, to reclaim the word “slut,” is “more contentious.”
The name “SlutWalk” was the topic of discussion at a forum on Friday, Sept. 30, where several faculty members from the U of M debated whether or not reclaiming the word slut could empower women.
“Obviously the name is provocative and confrontational, but it has had a mobilizing effect, and for that reason alone, in my opinion, it is successful,” argued Karen Busby, a professor in the faculty of law at the U of M and the director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.
Meena Krishnamurthy, a philosophy professor at the U of M, spoke against the idea of reclaiming the word “slut.”
She argued that “in promoting sexual promiscuity as a free choice,” the SlutWalk goal, to reclaim the word slut, ignores the circumstances of many vulnerable women, such as youth, sex workers, particularly those in less developed countries, and therefore does not promote genuine empowerment.
Jila Ghomeshi, associate professor in the department of linguistics, discussed whether reclaiming a word was possible “by the group to which it is pejoratively applied.”
Ghomeshi concluded it was impossible to rid a word of its “history of use.”
“If [a word] has been used as an insult, it will remain an insult in the mouths of people who wish to deride, to hurt or to demean.”
Brenda Austin-Smith, an associate professor in department of English and film studies, said she admired the energy and creativity of the SlutWalks but that as a movement it was not radical enough.
“Sexual autonomy in and of itself does not translate automatically into any other form of lasting social power,” Austin-Smith stated.
Take Back the Night (TBTN), another women’s rights march, has been a global event for decades, with one staged in Winnipeg for the past several years. This year’s march will take place Oct. 20.
Bre Woligroski, a member of the feminist collective FemRev and an organizer of this year’s Take Back The Night event, explained that TBTN hopes to raise issues around community safety, violence against women and sexual assault, as well as violence surrounding missing and murdered aboriginal women, an aspect that SlutWalk “doesn’t necessarily address.”
